Forty percent of family breadwinners are
With women making up nearly half the workforce and more than half of all university graduates, it shouldn't be a surprise that we now make up 40% of breadwinners in the United States. But while media outlets have breathlessly reported on the new "breadwinner moms", the real story is more complicated. The figures represent significant progress for women, but also reflect how traditional gender roles and scant social support for working parents make life in this new economy unnecessarily difficult for moms, dads and kids.
Forty percent of family breadwinners are, in fact, women. But the majority of that 40% – two thirds – are single moms. Less common are married women with children who out-earn their husbands. Those women tend to be college-educated, white and relatively wealthy, with a combined family income averaging nearly $80 000. By contrast, the single-mother breadwinners are more likely to be black or Latina, less likely to have a college degree, and younger. Their family incomes average $23 000.
We're talking about two very different groups of women corralled under the same umbrella of "breadwinners". Their experiences are radically divergent – but a few simple policy changes coupled with the adaptation of more progressive gender roles would make a world of difference for nearly all of them.
Troublingly, we've been slow to recognise the benefits of feminism, and the American right has attempted to stymie equality at every turn. Even in 2013, American views on working parents remain mixed. Half of Americans say that children are better-off with mothers who don't hold jobs and are at home full-time. But only 8% say children are better-off with full-time at-home fathers. And while the Pew poll didn't get into the weeds on this, I'd guess that the general image of the mom who most Americans think is best-off staying at home raising her kids is a white, college-educated woman – not a young, lower-income black or Latina single mom raising her kids without working for pay. That woman is more likely to be imaged as a "welfare queen", not the maternal ideal or a trend-piece mommy-blogging "SAHM" (stay-at-home mom).
The good news is that shifting gender roles have greatly benefited the family. Parents today spend more time with their children than ever before: fathers have tripled their time with their kids, and working moms today spend more hours a day with their children than stay-at-home moms did in the homemaker heyday of 1965.
Kids thrive when they grow up in stable families, whether those families are headed by a couple or an individual. Children of working moms don't suffer ill-effects. Couples who both work have lower divorce rates and higher rates of marital happiness. And mothers who work tend to be healthier than those who don't, having lower rates of depression and better physical health than their stay-at-home counterparts.
But the bad news is depressing indeed. Heterosexual couples who both work are happier, right up until the point where the female partner starts to out-earn her husband; then, marital satisfaction dips and divorce rates increase.
In these ubiquitous work/life balance conversations, an oft-repeated meme is that women drop out of the workforce because their husbands made more money and daycare was expensive, and it simply made more financial sense for him to keep working and her to stay home. That's certainly the reality for many couples, but the female partner is more likely to work part-time or drop out even where she is more highly-educated and had higher earning potential than her husband. That's not a purely financial decision; that's a strongly gendered one.
Among couples where the woman does earn more than the man, one would assume he'd do more around the house. But actually, women who are breadwinners in two-parent families seem to overcompensate for their non-traditional earner status: they not only do more housework than their husbands, but also more even than wives who earn less than their husbands.
The moral of the statistics is this: while some women are doing better than ever, most of us feel as though we're doing worse because our institutions haven't caught up to our social progress. Americans also continue to harbor a deep ambivalence toward women who are very successful. Success itself is fine, and we're used to seeing women achieve highly. But we're not OK with women achieving more highly than men.
Perhaps that partly explains why women hold fewer than 2% of CEO positions at Fortune 500 companies, fewer than a fifth of law firm partner positions, and just 18% of seats in Congress. This, despite the fact that women have been graduating from college and many graduate programmes at higher rates than men for well over a decade now.
Our dislike of the too-successful woman also bears itself out in policy. Crucial to the American identity are the values of freedom, individualism and choice. We all want to feel like the lives we lead were built largely by our own hand, and that we select our own paths to happiness. That mythology, though, starts to strain when you add dependent human beings to the mix. Men have long had the privilege of marrying someone who would simply take care of all the at-home work, allowing them to pursue their jobs without much worry about the rest of their lives. But women, traditionally tasked with primary responsibility for children and home, simply haven't had the nearly universal ability to put that burden on a partner while they seek out professional satisfaction and success.
Women haven't exactly written the history of America, and so our nation's strand of hardcore individualism means that we justify constrained decisions as our "choice". The personal choice narrative results in a general apathy toward pushes for institutional change, and a lack of the political will necessary to institute the kinds of policies that would give working parents real choices.
Without policies that have caught up to profound social changes, families are largely on their own to navigate these new gender and economic waters. More often than not, a retreat to traditional roles is the path of least resistance.
The United States desperately needs basic changes to make it possible for families to survive in a modern economy. Paid federal (government) maternity leave is the international norm, but the US is one of three countries, along with Papua New Guinea and Swaziland, that has no such thing. High-quality federally-subsidised daycare exists across western Europe; in the United States, wealthy families have access to excellent childcare, while middle- and low-income families either rely on one stay-at-home parent or gamble on a provider within a largely unregulated daycare system where providers range from excellent to abysmal.
We also simply need to work less. I'm sure, to more conservative readers, that sounds like liberal laziness, but Americans work more than people in any other industrialised nation. We have no federally mandated vacation, and we take fewer holidays than workers in other developed nations. One in four Americans gets no paid vacation at all.
We also work longer hours every day, leaving less time for basic life tasks like taking care of the kids, preparing and enjoying family meals, cleaning up, or even having a little leisure and play-time. It's much easier to balance work and life when you have more than one or two waking hours a day for the "life" part. And it's easier to share childcare and housekeeping responsibilities when both partners are home and awake for several hours in the morning and evening.
This is not just touchy-feely feminist social policy. With women now making up close to half the workforce, a system that burns out its workers before pushing out large proportions of them is not sustainable. It means not only fewer workers and the attendant fewer idea-makers and innovators, but many more workers who are ground-down and exhausted. Those workers have more physical and mental health complications, and so do their kids – all at great cost.
It's good news that more women than ever are able to support their families. But that support comes with a lot of strings. For single moms, in particular, the reality of primary breadwinner status feels like less of a feminist victory than simply being overworked, under-supported and broadly stigmatised.
Meanwhile, women who are married but out-earn their husbands occupy a delicate position. They may find that resentment flows both ways – from him feeling his masculinity is challenged, and from her feeling he's not pulling his own weight.
Despite the difficulties we all face in balancing our various relationships with our jobs, I suspect few women today would voluntarily go back to a pre-feminist era. Things are getting better, but the most marginalised women are trailing behind. These social growing pains are to be expected. But they could be far less painful – and far less harmful to workers, families and children – if the US had a stronger social safety net and a cultural ethos that prioritised mutual support over a false sense of individualism.
We just have to decide that true equality and a real range of choices are better than their illusions. – © Guardian News and Media 2013